Return of the King

Somehow I have got behind on posts again, and it’s not due to lack of adventures. Spring is proving wet, green, and very noisy with choirs of warblers that pretend to be invisible as they shout at extra volume from riverside tangle. Sometimes they slip up and permit a glimpse – I saw this sedge warbler in the Broads earlier this week.

Sedge warbler

To warblers, the Norfolk Broads – England’s premier wetland – is reeds and spiky bushes. To humans, it is the strange marriage between energy production and conservation; long ago, peat was dug under Norfolk’s vast skies, and the resulting depressions flooded into shallow lakes. Tidal rivers ebb and flow past them, and clouds buckle overhead.

Boat trip2

And birds paint many colours. Great crested grebes, our most elegant dancers, brighten even the sunniest day.

Great crested grebe1 May 23

Common terns sport a more modest uniform, but their nickname of sea-swallow hints at their airborne grace.

Common tern May 23

As for Broads royalty – he was the prime goal of Saturday’s voyage. It’s two centuries since ospreys bred here, but the persistant residence of this male at Ranworth Broad is giving hope that he might find a mate. Not easy to get a photo at that range from the water, so apologies for the quality, but his black and white splendour was still very special to see.

Osprey Ranworth1 6 May 23

I suspect he approves of his kingdom. I certainly did.

Boat trip

The Moods of April

Showers, mostly, modelled by a stoic brown hare.

And flowers, most especially red dead-nettles. These usually shy blushes of early spring have exploded across Norfolk this year, to the extent that some fields look like a heather moorland in August. Whether it was last year’s drought or this spring’s rain, who knows.

But old plants are preferred by reed buntings.

And wrens sing amongst the buds that are new.

Boundary Marker

Because this wood ain’t big enough for the both of us, or something like that.

Lift the counties, parishes and street names off an English map and you stare at the raw canvas: geology that props up a mindboggling array of different habitats, further rearranged by several thousand years of agriculture. There are borders on this map that are written in scratch marks and urine, and read through a sensitive nose.

And borders mean rules. If a land smells like a particular fox – because it has left its scent all over it – then that fox claims home advantage.

Foxes take a lackadaisical approach to territory. They live in small groups – typically a mated pair, and sometimes subordinate adults – and are more hostile to foxes outside this group than to those within. Some foxes are vagabounds and wander widely across the landscape, clashing noisily with territory residents. But even those with a land of their own will trespass if the prize – a mate or extra food – is tempting enough.

I’ve been wondering for some time about the relationships between foxes in this wood. At least three dogfoxes are regular visitors, not an easy balance. A fallen larch branch has turned into a marking post – both through the glands around their mouths and the more conventional, scat-based approach. Fox urine can persist in the environment longer than the average fox lifetime, and is easily detectable even to human nostrils.

Not that it always prevents fisticuffs.

For all the arched backs, upright brushes and theatrical gestures, I doubt the quarrel has been resolved for good. This wood is simply too attractive for anything that likes to eat earthworms; the rewards outweigh the risks. When the foxes finally go to rest, another earthworm predator swoops in to take over the feast.

This is a buzzard, one of the larger birds of prey in southern England. It, too, has its ideas of territory, as do the roe deer, badgers, dormice and shrews that write their own boundaries on the map. Our world is essentially a delicate, ever-changing riddle of small and natural boundary posts.

Sparrow Street

Day for this, day for that. Social media is jammed with ‘world days’ for just about everything now, but World Sparrow Day on March 20th caught my eye – a bit like the real bird, busy and confident in our urban shadow as if it were a small feathered fox.

Tree sparrow2

This is a tree sparrow, a rarity in England these days but abundant in the Philippines. The unevenness of nature is one of its marvels – some species paint the skies with a million silhouettes while others are known only to the most inquisitive scientists. That is not random; it reflects variation in whatever food and habitat is required, and in how wild things rise and fall on humans rhythms. This little bird, this sweet chirp in the warm grass, is perched firmly on human civilisation. Our crops feed it, our buildings house it, and our boats give it safe passage. In fact, it may have travelled to the Philippines with the Spanish fleet.

But tree sparrows tell us something else. So confident, so confiding, they unwittingly star in one of the bleakest parables of unintended consequences that we as a species have yet managed to write. Mao declared a brutally effective war on sparrows in 1950s China as part of the Four Pests campaign. It was to protect crops, of course, but without considering that sparrows actually eat crop-destroying insects. The destruction of sparrows contributed to a famine which killed up to 55 million people.

It is one lesson that should be told in every school and parliament in the world: think, from all angles, before doing.

Tree sparrow

But sparrows are birds of the present, and squabble and flutter as if yesterday is in the past. They still link us to nature, building a noisy, unruled life alongside commence and cluttered streets. Like foxes, they are the flag-bearers of a much broader collection of mostly shy wildlife that threads its way past us. When not watching sparrows in the Philippines, I was wondering how to find those others. I set up my my trailcam on the off chance it would catch something unusual, and it happens, it did.

The large dark birds in the first part of this video are barred rail, a common but extremely reclusive species of open landscapes and farmland. The toads are probably Philippine toads Ingerophrynus philippinicus, and I’m not even going to hazard a guess at the bat. I might have got more species except that the trailcam was knocked over by a magnitude 6 earthquake three days into its adventure. Here is the water cooler reacting to the 5.9 magnitude aftershock.

Perhaps that is the final lesson from sparrows. They lean on us, and that is not particularly safe; but we in turn stand on an unstable planet, and no dustings of urban glory will ever quite hide our need to remember that.

Tree Metropolis

So, Philippines.

Yes, I was in Mindanao earlier this month, my third visit to this land of numbers: 7,641 islands, about 109 million people, and trees – who can say how many trees? A hot, wet land under a sun on hyperspeed: it rises in a rush, soars scorchingly high into the sky, and collapses into a sunset twelve hours after dawn, when absurdly the air feels even stiffer. This is the kind of wild artistry that grows rainforests, and left to its own devices, the Philippines would be smothered by them, feathered out by mangrove swamps on the coast and tropical pinewoods in the mountains.

The reality, of course, is that most of the lowland rainforest has been cleared; the tall, straight trunks make for good timber, and the endangered lapnisan or agarwood has the unwelcome honour of being the world’s most expensive tree due to its wood being poached to produce oud perfume. But even where the primary forest has gone, the secondary growth is thick, and supports a fair variety of trilling, busy wild things.

Red-keeled flowerpecker

Red keeled flowerpecker

Philippine brown shrike

Shrike

No tree is a solitary life. Even in the rawest habitats – salt deserts, say, or the arable deserts of modern agriculture – a tree is a lifebuoy seized by lichens, birds and invertebrates. In the tropics, they are grabbed by other plants too; orchids and ferns perch on their limbs and frame, in a manner of living known as epiphytic. Sometimes it is difficult to know where the tree ends and its army of piggy-backing guests begins.

Big tree

Trees produce food as well as support, but not freely. These young glossy starlings will deposit the seeds in their droppings, spreading the tree’s offspring far further than it could achieve through mere gravity.

glossy starling chicks

Humans also gather from trees. In the Philippines, plums and apples are imported exotics in the malls, but mangoes, bananas and passion fruits can be picked by hand. Cacao trees, the birthplace of chocolate, sport their pods.

IMG_0217_DxO_DxO

And this is rambutan, brightening up its parent tree.

For all of the trees, the sun feeds them, and the moon sets behind them.

And the next day brings the pattern again.

Moonset

Stories under the Durian Tree

Philippines, March 2023

If heat has an anthem, perhaps it is something like this:

Coppersmith barbet, singing stories of feathered things in the land we call the Philippines. Birds know it better than we ever will, swooping and squabbling over trees that seem to be standing on tiptoes to outdo each other.

Past durian stalls and stray dogs, over telephone wires and construction sites.

Living their lives, learning their land, even as the millions of people in Mindanao do the same. In the heat and the hubbub, amidst the jeepneys and basketball courts, and the birds remain wild, but perched on the apparatus of humanity – or on the plants that we are pleased to provide.

Asian glossy starling

Glossy starling

Collared kingfisher

Collared kingfisher

Olive-backed sunbird

Sunbird1

Chestnut munia

Munias in grass

And the durian tree watches on, its fruits ready to fall.

Durian fruits_DxO

Double Crewed

With apologies to Wordsworth, I do not know if clouds prefer a lonely existence, but I am certain that nature down below is more crowded than any city street. The trailcam has caught a lot of crossed paths in recent weeks.

Rights of Way

To this fox, a badger is a jugganaut to be treated politely. To this badger, the fox appears an irrelevance to its evening. Badgers weigh more, socialise more, and have formidable jaws – they are in charge. Although it’s not uncommon to see foxes and badgers sharing a garden, glimpsing their interactions out in the countryside is quite difficult, and I think that this the first time that I’ve caught both species in a woodland cam video.

The lunch guest

Foxes are enthusiastic rat hunters, something which occasionally gives me pause because there is no way to know if the rat is loaded with non-lethal traces of rodenticide. DDT once taught us that toxins can accumulate in carnivores, and yet we still sprinkle many unpleasant substances on the wild by accident or ill will. There is no logic to any of this: we’ve banned bee-killing pesticides from agriculture and yet allow the same chemicals to get into rivers through dog spot-on flea treatments, and we complain about rats while unnecessarily putting their predator at risk. A study from Norway found that over half of foxes tested positive for traces of rat poison, with unknown consequences. In short, poisons should be left on the shelf.

Shared hotel

On a better note, deer rest in quiet if not in peace – winter brings redwings to their world, scurrying about the woodland floor and tossing leaves about in frenzy. These small thrushes with their brilliant white eyestripe and crimson splash on their underwings fly to southern Britain each winter, delighting anyone with a berry bush before vanishing again into the cold wild north.

Courtship

Winter brings sleep to dormice, hedgehogs and bats, but it is the peak of the social calendar for foxes. Vixens are only receptive for a very short window and are trailed by hopeful dog foxes. Telling male and female foxes apart takes some practice, but as shown here, vixens typically have a narrower head and a slightly ligher build.

Into the Sunset

Deer are not yet courting – roe do not rut until early summer. The buck, still in velvet, rubs his antlers on fallen brash.

Medley

Haven’t I been here since October? I’m surprised that WordPress hasn’t logged me out permanently. Been busy, but have still gathered many photos that could have been posted, and I’d better do so before the wild hands me any more. So here’s a few from the recent months:

1. Eyes in the oak tree

Sparrowhawk: intense, fast, lethal. They whip past me at terrifying proximity when I’m out walking, sharp wings piloting them at impossible angles between scrubs. This one came to visit on a cold December morning, a good close up sighting for me although I acknowledge that small wildlife was relieved when she left.

2. A sea of red

British red squirrels have become a symbol of nature in trouble. Their infamous story revolves around a catastrophic mishap by their human neighbours: the unthinking introduction of the non-native grey squirrel, carrier of the squirrel pox virus to which reds so easily succomb. Today, red squirrels are rare in England. So it was strangely wonderful to be overrun by them in a rain-lashed woodland in Yorkshire back in November – up trees, down trees, sliding off peanut feeders, running softly behind me even while I tried to concentrate on others in front. It was a gentle yet busy sort of forest magic.

This is, it should be added, Sciurus vulgaris. It has nothing in common except its name with Tamiasciurus hudsonicus, the species known as the red squirrel in North America. Well, except an extreme determination to gather food.

3. The Ways of a River

Freezing, thawing, now brightened up by ducks again. Norfolk really consists of rivers, with land added on as an afterthought.

4. Grave with a View

Another cold December morning, this time in the story-spiced vistas of the Peak District, with the gritstone teeth of Cattis-Side Moor glowing pink on the horizon. But I think I’ve spent enough time in the uplands recently for that to warrant a post or two of its own.

And I hope all is well elsewhere in the blogsphere! Looking forward to catching up with you all.

Guests on a Swirling Carpet

Autumn: when a cold artist is awake before the sun.

The season of mists and fruit, and also birds, some tall and familiar.

Misty heron Oct 22

Others lively, but more easily overlooked. Reed buntings warm the marshes.

Reed bunting Oct 2022

Dunnocks take to the hedges.

Dunnock Sept 22

And waterbirds of all sizes scurry across mudflats.

Goose and stints Titchwell 2022

These are ruff, absurd and ceremonial in their summer breeding plumage but relatively low key now.

Ruff Titchwell 2022

Except for one – this ruff is partly leucistic, hence the white feathers on its head and neck.

Redshank leucistic Sept 22

They are visitors here; very few ruff breed in England, and most will continue on to Africa.

The mists will continue to grow.

Misty lake Oct 22

The Saint and his Seabirds

More from my trip to Northumberland back in the spring, AKA another respite from this burning summer in the south.

About 1,300 years ago, a middle-aged man moved to Inner Farne, seeking hermitage in the buildings where Aidan – Apostle to England – had dwelt not long before. So great was Cuthbert’s need for solitude that he grew his own food rather than accept supplies, but he accepted the friendship of the island’s wildlife, and sheltered eider ducks when the weather turned raw.

Eider duck2

Cuthbert passed some of the world’s first conservation laws to protect these exquisite sea ducks on the Farne Islands. When he died, his body was moved to Holy Island (Lindisfarne), and after the Vikings invaded, monks faithfully carried it inland. His eventual burial place by the River Wear is now Durham Cathedral.

Cuthburt statue

That is the drama of many lifetimes ago. But Cuthbert’s ducks – still nicknamed Cuddy ducks in his honour – continue to grace Northumberland, and they are far from alone.

Grey heron, eating a brown trout

Grey heron trout